London Calling: The best-connected chip executive

Is Young Sohn of Samsung Electronics the best connected executive in semiconductors?

Young Sohn is president and chief strategy officer of Samsung Electronics. He is also the driving force behind Samsung's plans to invest in innovation through a $100 million seed fund, a $1 billion venture fund and plans to increase Samsung's head count in Silicon Valley.

At the same time Young Sohn has just been appointed to the board of EDA company Cadence Design Systems Inc. (San Jose, Calif.) and adds that directorship to ones he holds with lithography light source provider Cymer Inc. (San Diego, Calif.). Sohn is also a former non-executive director at ARM Holdings plc. Sohn also serves as a senior advisor at Silver Lake, a private investment firm, and at Inphi Corp. and is on the North American Executive Board for the MIT Sloan School of Management. He previously served as president and chief executive officer of Inphi Corp. from August 2007 to February 2012 and before that led the semiconductor group of Agilent.

Young Sohn, chief strategy officer at Samsung

I think readers would struggle to find a more actively connected, or diversely experienced executive. But I am willing to hear the cases for alternative contenders.

Young Sohn is probably not the most powerful semiconductor executive – at least not yet.

The latter honor probably goes to Morris Chang, chairman and CEO of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. or Paul Otellini, president and CEO of Intel Corp. who with a wave of their respective spreadsheet fingers could seriously impact the availability and cost of leading-edge silicon for months or years to come.

But Morris Chang, aged 81 years, must be close to retirement and Otellini, aged 62, has already announced his plans to step down and that the search for his replacement has started.Related links and articles: